David Wilmot Confers With President Polk

James K. Polk's diary entry for Wednesday December 23, 1846 describes a curious conversation that the president held with David Wilmot.

Four months earlier, as the Congressional session was expiring, Wilmot had lobbed his incendiary Proviso into the debate over the Mexican War. Now, shortly after the beginning of the new term, Wilmot made an appointment to see the president, arriving "[a]fter night" on December 23rd. By coincidence, Charles J. Ingersoll, another Democratic member of the House from Pennsylvania, showed up unannounced shortly after Wilmot did, apparently cramping the conversation somewhat. Nonetheless, the president was able to "hold hold a conversation with him [Wilmot] on the subject of slavery restriction, which had been attached upon his motion at the last Session of Congress to the Bill which proposed to appropriate two millions of Dollars, with a view to enable the Executive to make a Treaty with Mexico."

The strange part is that Wilmot had apparently scheduled the meeting to tell the president that he would not re-introduce his Proviso in the current session:

He expressed an entire willingness to vote for the appropriation without the restriction, and said he would not again move the restriction, but that if it was moved by others he would feel constrained to vote for it.

Polk attempted to reassure Wilmot that he was making the right decision. The Mexican War was not some conspiracy to extend slavery to New Mexico and California. Echoing arguments made by others, the president contended that it would be virtually impossible for slavery to take root in those places. At all events, the Proviso represented an improper attempt to restrict the Executive's power to negotiate a treaty, and as a practical matter would make any peace treaty with Mexico unratifiable by the Senate:

I told him I did not desire to extend slavery, that I would be satisfied to acquire by Treaty from Mexico the Provinces of New Mexico & the Californias, and that in these Provinces slavery could probably never exist, and the great probability was that the question would never arise in the future organization of territorial or State Governments in these territories. I told him that slavery was purely a domestic question, and to restrict the appropriation which had been asked for, so as to require the President to insert it in a Treaty with a Foreign Power, was not only inappropriate and out of place, but that if such a Treaty were made it must be opposed by every Senator from a slave-holding State, and as one third of the Senators could reject a Treaty it could not be ratified, though it might be satisfactory in all other respects. I told him that tramelled with such a restriction I could not use the appropriation at all and would not do so.

Wilmot then reiterated that he would be willing to vote for the so-called $2 Million Bill without any restriction attached. If others renewed the Proviso, he was in favor of non-binding sense-of-Congress language:

He said he would be satisfied with a simple legislative declaration in the Bill of the sense of Congress, without requiring it to be inserted in the Treaty, or, if it was not moved by others, he would be willing to vote for the appropriation without such a restriction in any form.

Ingersoll's presence then aborted the conversation, and Wilmot departed.

I, at least, was surprised to read of Wilmot's expressed flexibility. He had introduced his Proviso less than four months earlier with an intensity of expression that suggested no ground for compromise. To the best of my knowledge, his public pronouncements thereafter demonstrated an unrelenting resolve to bar slavery from previously free territory.

Did Wilmot have a temporary pang of regret that he he had inadvertently caused an earthquake? Was he cynically seeking to demonstrate party loyalty or obtain Polk's favor for a pet cause? Or was the performance nothing but a charade, since he knew that in all probability one or more of his co-conspirators would re-introduce the Proviso, making his pledge irrelevant? (In fact, Preston King gave notice that he would re-introduce the Proviso less than a week later, on December 29, 1846.) And if so, why? Your informed speculation is welcome.

"The vastness of our country . . ."

In my last post, I reviewed a speech that David Wilmot delivered on the tariff in July 1846. This post continues and concludes that review.

Several weeks ago, I pointed out that in January 1847 Wilmot's colleague Preston King invoked the pioneer with his axe when he denounced slavery expansion. The same imagery appears in Wilmot's tariff speech six months earlier:

The bold pioneer, who with his axe fearlessly encounters our heavy forests and subdues our rugged soil, makes a valuable and permanent conquest over nature for the benefit of man. He has added something to the world’s stock, and made that which before was useless subservient to the happiness and support of his race.

Has he in his noble undertaking asked the bounties of Government in his behalf? Has he come with greedy and selfish grasp, demanding from the public treasury a premium upon the land cleared by him, or upon the wheat and corn raised as a product of his labor? Sir, this man asks only protection from rapacity and wrong.

“[T]he farmer,” Wilmot complained, “is fleeced.” “[T]hese enormous profits come from . . . the pockets of the people.” “Privilege and monopoly are ever selfish – ever grasping. Interest is the sole governing principle of all their actions.”

Later, Wilmot touched on the intersection between labor and land. The passage offers a tantalizing hint as to why Wilmot and other northern Democrats like him placed so much importance on Free Soil, both in theory and in fact. The continued existence of the United States as a republic, Wilmot suggested, depended on the continued availability of inexpensive land. Just look at Europe:

I solemnly believe, if this policy [of protection] could be permanently established, that not one century would pass away before the free and independent laborers of this country would be reduced to the degrading condition of the laborers of Europe. It would sap and undermine our republican institutions. The people would lose control over their own Government, and wealth become firmly intrenched in all the seats and high places of power.

The vastness of our country, and the cheapness of the unoccupied lands, have hitherto prevented the full development and workings of this system. Had our limits been confined between the Atlantic and the Alleganies [sic], we should ere this have witnessed the fruits of this system upon the labor of the country. We should have seen here, as in England, men, women, and children, working from fourteen to eighteen hours in the day for a mere subsistence. It is this accursed policy of legislation for the capital of the country, together with the paper-money system, that has contributed more than all other causes, to fasten upon the English laborer a slavery worse than that of the lash.

(Emphasis added)

About the illustration:

A virulent attack on Vice-President George M. Dallas, charging the former Pennsylvania attorney and senator with duplicity in his stand on the tariff of 1846. "Jesuitism" was a strong contemporary term for deception and intrigue, and the artist portrays Dallas's support of the 1846 tariff as a reversal of his campaign pledge to support the popular tariff of 1842. In 1846, the Polk administration introduced and passed (Dallas's own vote as president of the Senate being a deciding factor) the Walker Tariff. The 1846 tariff involved a reduction of the tariff of 1842, which had been supported by the Democratic platform in the 1844 election. The later measure, a revenue tariff rather than a protectionist one, was reviled by the considerable industrial interests of Pennsylvania and other northeastern states. In the print, Dallas (right) addresses a crowd in the street from the steps of his law office. He displays a large banner reading, "Polk, Dallas, Shunk [successful Democratic gubernatorial candidate Francis M. Shunk] And The Tariff of 1842." Dallas: "Friends & Fellow Citizens, the Tariff of 1842 is a democratic measure & as such will be supported by Mr. Polk & Myself! I am, as my friend Joel B. Sutherland [former Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania] says, a man of principle according to my interest!" Various comments from the crowd: "Go it George We all want Protection!" An Irishman with shillelagh: "That's the way to talk! Dan [i.e., Whig senator and champion of protectionism Daniel Webster] himself couldn't bate that be Jasus!" "Hurah! a true Pennsylvanian every inch of im." In the lower left a conversation among several gentlemen: "I told you that Polk & Dallas were more in favor of the Tariff of 42 than [1844 Whig presidential candidate Henry] Clay!" "I'll believe it when I see it!" "who does he [i.e., Dallas] remind you of?" "He's very much like Talleyrand in hair & Principles--in all else wanting." A Pennsylvania German with a clay pipe remarks, "I says noding but I dinks so much!" Francis Shunk enters from the left with arms full of papers with the names of western Pennsylvania counties on them. He announces to Dallas, "Hold on till I bring some big Democratic Guns from the west--to bear on the question! When it come to the point then I'll talk, For I'm the real Simon "Pure!""

"Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil"

Having posted several quibbles concerning minor inaccuracies and inconsistencies in Jonathan H. Earle’s Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854, I thought I should make sure that the record is clear: this is an eye-opening book.

The growth of the anti-slavery (or more properly anti-slavery extension) movement in the north in the decades before the Civil War is generally thought of as a Whiggish phenomenon. Whiggish types, absorbing via the Second Great Awakening the evangelical morality that also gave rise to the temperance campaign, increasingly came to regard slavery as a sin and moral blot on the body of the Republic. Yes, there may have been a few oddball Democrats who saw the light and ultimately tagged along, but for the most part northern Democrats seemed to be amoral at best: Lewis Cass inventing popular sovereignty, Franklin Pierce, Stephen Douglas and James Buchanan generally toadying to the south and the southern wing of their party.

Professor Earle sets out to correct this misimpression. In fact, a number of Democrats led the way in identifying slavery and the slave power as enemies. One of the delights of the book lies in meeting and getting to know previously unknown or indistinct political figures: Thomas Morris of Ohio and Preston King of New York (both of whom I have discussed before); John P. Hale, who unexpectedly precipitated a dramatic political realignment in New Hampshire, previously the “South Carolina of the North”; Marcus Morton of Massachusetts; and even David Wilmot, otherwise a vague figure who in most narratives mysteriously appears out of nowhere, only to disappear again into the mist.

More importantly, Professor Earle explores why there seems to have been a correlation between radical, hard-money, anti-Bank Democrats and opposition to the expansion of slavery. One key, he argues, was the tendency of radical democrats to perceive conspiratorial coalitions of interests that threatened to dominate yeoman farmers and urban proletariat: manufacturers who clamored for high tariffs, monopolistic corporations that shielded capitalists from ordinary rules of individual liability, and most famously the Monster Bank.

With a little squinting, Professor Earle suggests, slaveholders could look a lot like an aristocratic special interest. In an earlier post, I quoted from an 1839 speech by Senator Thomas Morris (Dem – Ohio), in which he not only drew the parallel but argued that the Bank Power and the Slave Power had joined forces:

But all will not do; these two powers must now be united; an amalgamation of the black power of the South with the white power of the North must take place, as either, separately, cannot succeed in the destruction of the liberty of speech and the press and the right of petition. Let me tell gentlemen that both united will never succeed. As I said on a former day, God forbid that they should ever rule this country. I have seen this billing and cooing between these different interests for some time past; I informed my private friends . . . that these powers were forming a union to overthrow the present [Van Buren] Administration . . ..

* * *

[T]he assertion has gone forth that we have twelve hundred millions of slave property at the South; and can any man so close his understanding here as not plainly to perceive tht the power of this vast amount of property at the South is now uniting itself to the banking power of the North, in order to govern the destinies of this country? Six hundred millions of banking capital is to be brought into this coalition, and the slave power and the bank power are thus to unite in order to break down the present Administration. There can be no mistake, as I believe, in this matter. The aristocracy of the North, who, by the power of a corrupt banking system, and the aristocracy of the South, by the power of the slave system, both fattening upon the labor of others, are now about to unite in order to make the reign of each perpetual. Is there an independent American to be found who will become the recreant slave to such an unholy combination? Is this another compromise to barter the liberties of the country for personal aggrandizement? “Resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.”

Almost ten years later, Pennsylvania Democrat David Wilmot spoke in similar terms:

“The gallant and true men who fought the battle of popular rights against privilege and monopoly – who aided in crushing the monster bank, and wresting from the grasp of eastern capital the hard earnings of labor, will never fight the battles of slavery propagandism” [Wilmot declared]. Again investing the rhetoric of antislavery with an older brand derived from the pen of William Leggett, Wilmot insisted that since southern capital had “a thousand millions of dollars invested in slaves,” the current struggle, like the bank war in the 1830s, was best viewed as one between “capital and labor.”

But what seems to given urgency to the threat presented by the Slave Power was the concept of Free Soil, which Professor Earle asserts is the crucial and overlooked component of the “free soil, free labor, free men” trilogy. Free Soil was not, Professor Earle argues, simply a “synonym for [the] more developed concept of free labor, an ideology . . . closely linked with the rise of capitalism in the North. . . . [M]any Free Soilers . . . came from remote rural areas or radical labor backgrounds and felt nothing but contempt for Whiggish free-labor views.”

The term originally referred to land reform: “the free distribution of the public lands to poor settlers, in the form of inalienable homesteads.” Although containing slavery was an incidental benefit, the scheme also enhanced democracy (more of those Jeffersonian yeoman farmers), reduced unemployment and raised wages, and attacked privileged land monopolists and speculators.

In time, however, “the Free Soil ideology [evolved] from a program for land reform to a bulwark against slavery expansion.” It was precisely the elusiveness of the phrase that made Free Soil so politically potent:

During the 1840s and 1850s, homesteads became unalterably fused with the issue of slavery expansion . . .. This link underscored Free Soil’s rhetorical elusiveness and ambiguity. The potent term was appropriated by a host of other groups, movements, and political parties, including the Free Soil Party and, later, the Republicans. No matter who appropriated it, however, Free Soil always potentially implied the double meaning . . .: land free of charge and at the same time free of slavery. Free Soil managed to speak directly to the anxieties of poor or vulnerable northern whites, creating a new source of support for limiting slavery’s expansion.

The radical Democratic critique of slavery was thus very different from the moral and religious foundations of abolitionism and abolition-based political organizations such as the Liberty Party. The emphasis on Free Soil and the Slave Power also focused the political debate squarely on the territories.

The genius of the Free Soil and Republican parties was to incorporate the double meaning of Free Soil – and its radical Democratic message – into their platforms. By doing so they were able to broaden their base to include large numbers of Democrats who became convinced that their former party had become “a tool of the slaveholding oligarchy.” These Democrats, moreover, often came from hardscrabble rural districts that had consistently resisted the lure of the Whigs -- areas such as New York's "Passed-Over District" and the Wilmot District of Pennsylvania. It is no accident that in 1862 the Republican Party produced the Homestead Act as well as the Emancipation Proclamation.

Quibbles and all, Professor Earle's book is excellent. Highly recommended.

About the illustration:

An election-year satire favoring Free Soil candidate Martin Van Buren in the 1848 presidential contest. A long-legged John Van Buren carries his father piggyback through Salt River, heading toward the White House on the far shore. "Matty" says, "Thanks to your long legs, John, I believe that I shall pass over this Jordan dry shod." The younger Van Buren assures his father, "Hold on Dad & I'll put you through." Meanwhile, abolitionist editor Horace Greeley and candidates Taylor and Clay are having a more difficult time fording the river. Clay is immersed head first, leaving only his legs visible. Taylor is neck-deep in the water. Greeley yells to Kentucky Whig leader Cassius M. Clay, seated on the near bank, "Help, Cassius, or I Sink." Clay replies, "Can't come there, Horace, I risked my life in Mexico, & I don't like to do it again." (Cassius Clay was a hero of the recent Mexican War).

The Wilmot District

David Wilmot was elected to Congress in 1844 as the representative of Pennsylvania's 12th Congressional District. The 12th District was then composed of Tioga, Bradford and Susquehanna Counties (shown in white in the map above) in the state's northeast.

Jonathan H. Earle explains that the area encompassed by the 12th District was the Pennsylvania version of New York's Passed-Over District. The area was "[r]ugged, densely wooded, and remote," and the "land was rocky and poor." It had "very little industry and even fewer banks." In short, the district that Wilmot represented had been "'passed over' by the revolutions in transportation, markets, and information exchange that transformed" other areas of the north in the period.

"Predictably, the district was a bastion of Democratic electoral strength," with many expressing views on "canal 'monopolies.'" high taxes, "absentee 'land sharks'" and protective tariffs that "closely resembled" those of "the hard-money antibank radicals of New York's remote North Country, home of Democratic politicians Silas Wright and Preston King."

"The same interest still desires its further extension"

When we last visited with Senator Preston King, he was mid-way through his January 5, 1847 speech providing “a personal explanation” of his bill that in effect re-introduced the Wilmot Proviso, which had died in the Senate at the end of the previous term of Congress in August 1846. Let us now pick up where we left off.

The “brave and patriotic generation who achieved our independence and established the republic,” King maintained, “did not hesitate” to pass “the ordinance of July, 1787, by which slavery . . . was forever prohibited” in the old Northwest Territory. And it was that one Act that had allowed “young men with their axes” to create “powerful Commonwealths” there “within the memory of a single generation, free, populous and flourishing.” Would Americans abandon this heritage and this lesson, and allow free territory to be converted into lands dominated by combinations of wealthy slaveholders and degraded by slave labor?

Shall we hesitate to do the same thing for territory where slavery does not now exist? I trust not. The man who has wealth or credit, to purchase a plantation, and becomes the owner of slaves, may settle and reside without social degradation in a country where slavery exists. Not so with the laboring white man. He cannot go without social degradation, and he therefore will not go. He is excluded quite as effectually as he could be by law. The mere presence of slavery, wherever it exists, degrades the condition, the respectability, the character of labor. A false and mischievous public opinion regarding the condition and respectability of labor is produced by its presence; and false and recreant to his race and to his constituency would be any Representative of free white labor upon a condition of social equality with the labor of the black slave; equally false would he be who, upon any pretence, should, by inaction and evasion of the question, produce the same degrading result.

For the most part, despite his withering attack on the institution of slavery, King restrained himself from directly attacking southerner legislators. This, however, did slip out (emphasis added):

This principle [in the proposed bill] excludes slavery from any territory which may hereafter be added to this country. This principle I deem to be of vital importance, and should be very much gratified if it could receive the unanimous assent and approbation of Congress. This, however, I do not expect. The same interest which pertinaciously insisted upon extending slavery over Texas, still desires, I apprehend, its further extension.

King then addressed the contention that “the people themselves” should decide whether to permit slavery – in effect, the Popular Sovereignty doctrine later developed by Lewis Cass and Stephen Douglas. King branded the idea as “unsound and false.” Unless forbidden by statute, slavery would inevitably spread:

If left alone, slaves more or less will be carried to the new territory, and if the country while it remains a territory should be settled by a population holding slaves, the new, and additional question of abolition is presented, and in order to get a free State slavery must first be abolished. This embarrassment in a new community, without means to indemnify its owners, would be an obstacle almost insurmountable, and the new State would be very far from being free to choose between becoming a free State or a slave State.

King briefly and unconvincingly tried to argue that the converse was not true: establishment of territory as free did not of exclude the possibility that a slave state might result; it simply permitted the people of the territory to make the decision “unembarrassed by any pecuniary interests or questions of vested right.” However, he soon dropped this evasion, maintaining that it “must be obvious to all” “that the character of the population in the Territory will determine the character of the State, when that Territory shall be erected into a State.”

If the Territory has a slave population of one one-fourth or one-fifth of the whole number, it will be a slave State. If a free population while a Territory, it will be a free State. Exclude slavery from all territory not within the limits of a State, and I am willing the Territory shall determine for itself, when it becomes a State, what shall be its character.

King concluded by urging Congress “to make this free principle a law” to avoid planting slavery upon free territory:

I desire the adoption of the free principle, because I believe it to be just to the free States, just to the white men who fight our battles, and who constitute the strength of the country in peace or war; because I believe it to be consistent with the principles of our Government, and because I believe it will tend to improve the condition and character of labor in the whole country. And who will deny that, in a republic, it should be one of the chief objects of Government to elevate and dignify the condition and character of labor?

About the illustration:

A mock triumphal procession ridiculing "Loco Foco" or radical Democratic support of candidates James K. Polk and George M. Dallas. The Loco Focos are portrayed as ragged Irishmen, carrying the two candidates on a rail. Polk, holding tight to the rail, remarks, "It appears to me, friend Dallas that there is a wonderful democratic simplicity in the honors which are paid us!" Dallas, holding tight to Polk, replies, "It is true, friend Polk, that, on this occasion we shall find no difficulty in bearing our blushing honors meekly." One of the rail bearers exclaims, "Glory to those whom the people delight to honor!!!" The procession is led by a man in knee-breeches holding a weathervane with a tiny figure of incumbent President John Tyler on its tip. The man complains, "Bedad, I can't carry you [i.e., Tyler] if you turn with every flaw of wind." Two blacks, playing fife and drums, bring up the rear.

Millard Fillmore, Governor of New York?

I’ve noticed what I think are two minor but disconcerting mistakes in Jonathan H. Earle’s Democratic Antislavery.

First, Professor Earles states that “Preston King kept his promise to reintroduce the [Wilmot] proviso on the first day of the new congressional session [in December 1846].”

My review of the Congressional Globe, discussed two posts ago, indicates, however, that King did not attempt to introduce his bill containing Proviso language until December 29, 1846, which was not the first day of the session. Perhaps Professor Earle meant to say “the first month of the session”?

Second, Professor Earle states:

The immediate effect of the Barnburner revolt was a humiliating Democratic defeat in the 1847 election. Majorities for Whig gubernatorial candidate Millard Fillmore numbered more than 38,000, making 1847 the high-water mark of Whig power in the state.

Unfortunately, Millard Fillmore did not run for governor of New York in 1847. In fact, no one did. Elections for governor – a two year term – were then held in the autumn of even years, with the governor taking office the following January. John Young had been elected governor in the fall of 1846 and assumed office in January 1847. The next gubernatorial election would not be held until the fall of 1848.

Millard Fillmore did run for state office in the autumn of 1847. But he ran for and was elected to the office of Comptroller. The Comptroller's office was the most important position contested that year, so he in effect headed the Whig ticket. Professor East must have momentarily forgotten that the head of the ticket was not running for governor.

"One or the other it must be; it cannot be both"

Preston King seems to embody the mysterious Barnburner-Free Soil connection. A hard-money, anti-bank, anti-monopoly Democrat who represented a hardscrabble, largely rural constituency from the far northern Passed-Over reaches of New York, King evolved into an economic Radical and Barnburner. At the same time, King increasingly came to believe that slaveholders were dominating his national party, and to perceive the spread of slavery as a threat to the ability of his free farmer constituents to settle the west.

Jonathan H. Earle reports that King developed “repugnance” to slavery by late 1844 or early 1845:

When annexation (with Polk’s election, a fait accompli) came up, leading Van Burenites and future Wilmot Proviso supporters George Rathbun, Lemuel Stetson, and Preston King spoke out forcefully against Texas. King, for one, was startled at the intensity of his own feelings on the matter: “I was . . . surprised at my own repugnance to Texas on the single point of slavery. The southerners do not want Texas without slavery – I would take Texas tonight without slavery . . ..” King and twenty-six other Van Buren Democrats (all fourteen from New York) risked being branded as hypocrites and defectors and voted against Texas annexation.

Jumping forward two years, it was King who re-introduced the Wilmot Proviso, four months after it died at the end of the last Congress. According to Professor Earle, King’s speech was “reprinted and distributed throughout the North, and even prompted President Polk

to confide to his diary that “the slavery question is assuming a fearful and most important aspect. The movement of Mr. King today, if persevered in, will be attended with terrible consequences to the country and cannot fail to destroy the Democratic party, if it does not ultimately threaten the union itself.”

I therefore thought I’d take a look at Representative King’s speech.

To begin at the beginning, on Tuesday December 29, 1846, Representative King “gave notice that he would”

introduce “a bill making further provision for the expenses attending the intercourse between the United States and foreign nations,” being the bill known as the $2,000,000 bill, which passed the House of Representatives at the close of the last session, and lost in the Senate.

Representative King attempted to introduce his bill on Monday January 4, 1847. It proposed to appropriate $2MM “to enable the President to conclude a treaty of peace with the Republic of Mexico.” Section 2 substantially repeated the substance of the Wilmot Proviso:

And be it further enacted, That there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any territory which shall hereafter be acquired by or be annexed to the United States, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. Provided always, That any person escaping into the same from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the United States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed out of said territory to the person claiming his or her service.

Due to procedural maneuvering, the formal introduction was delayed by a vote of 88-89.

The next day, Tuesday January 5, 1847, Rep. King obtained the floor in order to “make a personal explanation” concerning the “bill which I yesterday asked leave to introduce.” An article had appeared in the morning newspaper that “mistakes the purpose of the bill.” King desired “briefly to state the reasons and opinions which induced me to propose the measure.” Interestingly, King specifically explained that he had written out and was reading his comments “that I may not be misunderstood.”

King began by explaining that his actions were “governed solely by the desire to bring the subjects of the bill to the early consideration and action of the House.” He suspected that some members of the House were hoping the “Wilmot proposition” issue would just go away:

I will frankly say, that if I had not supposed that there was a disposition in some quarters silently to give the free principle of the Wilmot proposition the go-by, and, by smothering and avoiding action upon it, to give further extension to the dominions of slavery at the expense of free territory, I should not have brought forward this bill.

He was, King made clear, in favor of territorial expansion. But the territory that should, would and must be taken from Mexico “should be free.” “The time has come when this Republic should declare by law that it will not be made an instrument to the extension of slavery on the continent of America.”

“Every inch of Texas was yielded to slavery,” King complained, and yet the South was still not satisfied. Now the representatives of the slave states desired “to carry it where it does not now exist.”

The choice, King maintained, was between free territory and labor or slave labor. Using language that prefigured Seward’s “irrepressible conflict” and Lincoln’s “house divided,” King argued that “it must be” “[o]ne or the other”; “it cannot be both.”

Shall the territory now free which shall come to our jurisdiction be free territory, open to settlement by the laboring man of the free States, or shall it be slave territory given up to slave labor? One or the other it must be; it cannot be both. The labor of the free white men and women, and of their children, cannot and will not eat and drink, and lie down, and rise up with the black labor of slaves; free white labor will not be degraded by such association. If slavery is not excluded by law, the presence of the slave will exclude the laboring white man. The young men who went with their axes into the forests, and hewed out of the wilderness such States as Ohio and Indiana and Michigan and Illinois and Iowa and Wisconsin, would never have consented, in the workshops or in the field, to be coupled with negro slaves.

Professor Earle observes:

King’s mention of western pioneers was no accident. In what would become a mainstay of Free Soil rhetoric (borrowed from anti-rent and land-reform journals) antislavery Democrats like King referred again and again to slaveholders choking off potential immigration to new and old territories. Arguments such as these were especially powerful in rural New York. Many of the farmers in King’s district (and those surrounding it as well) had sons and daughters moving westward at a truly furious pace . . .. Dozens of King’s and [Silas] Wright’s own relatives in the North Country had already moved or were planning to leave soon.

About the illustration:

A particularly well-drawn satire on the three major presidential contenders for 1848, (left to right) Zachary Taylor, Martin Van Buren and Lewis Cass. Of the three the artist seems to favor Van Buren, the "Barnburner" candidate, who sits on a stool milking the cow which the others try in vain to move in opposite directions. Taylor, who tugs at the tail of the animal, is called a "No Party Man" because of his continued refusal to commit to a party ideology. Cass, the "Hunker" or conservative Democrat, strains at the cow's horns. Van Buren: "I go in for the free soil. Hold on Cass, dont let go Taylor, (That's the cream of the Joke)." Van Buren was the candidate of a coalition, between Barnburner Democrats and Liberty and Whig party abolitionists, called the Free Soil party. Zachary Taylor: "I don't Stand on the whig Platform 'I ask no favor and shrink from no Responsibility.'" Lewis Cass: "Matty is at his old tricks again, and going in for the Spoils old Zack, and myself will get nothing but skim milk."

The Barnburners and the Proviso

The preponderance of New York Barnburners present at the [Wilmot] proviso's creation . . . is worth noting here. Six of the eleven instigators of the proviso . . . were either New Yorkers or members of Barnburner leader Preston King's mess in Washington. Each was a Van Buren Democrat.

Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Democracy & the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854.

Next, we'll take a closer look at Mr. King.